Titan image: Holy moly

Well, if that image was taken from an elevation of 2 feet rather than several kilometers, I will look rather silly, but if someone has a better explanation than drainage patterns, I am listening.

We have a surface level side image going up at UTI any sec.

Much more on Huygens pictures at Unscrewing the Inscrutable.

That is just so cool.

Raw images at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/data.htm. We’ll have some of the better ones up in a jiffy.

Man, I’m at a loss for words. Awesome.

Well, if that image was taken from an elevation of 2 feet rather than several kilometers, I will look rather silly, but if someone has a better explanation than drainage patterns, I am listening.

Well, you could start here.

[ducks!]

Syntax Error: mismatched tag at line 7, column 2, byte 416 at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/XML/Parser.pm line 187

Nick- For some of the images that show the beautiful drainage patterns, have you been able to find out anything about the scale of what they are showing?

Yeah, they were taken during the parachute descent, so they must be a kilometer or two up at least.

Since the above link has 404 errors instead of raw images:

Give me hundreds of raw images

The images are out of order.

Nice to see the Europeans wised up and fairly quickly released raw images. It was not plan a few days ago.

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Jon H Wrote:

I think the Mars rovers have spoiled me.

I WANT MORE PICTURES!

All those raw pictures seem to be differently calibrated views of the same thing, or some such.

No they don’t. Look again. Skip to the 500s. Remember what I said about them being out of order?

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Update: 9:53 EST Good review of the Surface Science Package or SSP. Surface temp is a balmy -180 C. Titan has something like a tropopause with a min temp of -200 C at an altitude of 50 kms and possibly a thermocline/ dense cloud layer; ghostly sonic reflections were received from several kms above the surface. Penotrameter data suggests Huygens may have landed in a soft slurry of methane and or water ices with a thin fragile crust. Huygens tilt data indicates a rest angle of about 20 degrees off level, and rock solid steady; no bobbing or wave action.

Update: ESA Systems Science, Damstadt Germany, 6:03 EST AM Jan 15. Data indicates the presence of water ice, methane, ethane, acetylene, and ‘possibly’ other, heavier, hydrocarbons on the surface. In the side-surface shot in the previous frame (see photo two, side-surface view), the objects (ice blocks) are in the 10-20 cm range; they are fairly close to Huygens; the DISR is approximately 40 cm above the surface looking down and out at them at an angle of perhaps 30-45 degrees off level. Optical band wavelength data presented suggests the surface color is a bright yellow with perhaps a touch of orange; almost looks like the hue of raw sulfur in places.

The surface in color

(Usual disclaimer: camera does not see the same way you do so the colors might not be completely “correct.”)

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Udate: 1:52 EST. Rough mosiacs and color pic from ESA via The Two Perecnt Company Rants.

DaveScot:

I think Velikovsky beat you to it.

DaveScot Wrote:

Let me be the first to put forward the theory that Titan and Earth descended from a common ancestor.

Umm you are way late. Astronomers, cosmologists etc have been saying just this for decades. The Earth and Titan both come from the same halo that surrounded our sun early in the solar system’s formation ~6 billion years ago. Those elements formed from a massive supernova that exploded a bit further in the past. But then you can deny that any systems out there where created via GAs so I’m sure you can deny this too. Please talk to David Heddle if you are in doubt about radiometric dating etc.